Climate change Chicken Littles look at ordinary phenomenon and extrapolate their way to Armageddon

Approximately every ten years, Marin County floods.  Thinking back, the last big flood year in our neighborhood was around 2002 or 2003.  I remember taking the kids down from the hill on which we live to the marshy flat-lands nearby.  We waded through water that came up past our knees.  This high water was a combination of heavy rain and unusually high tides.

This year, those unusually high tides are back (as they invariably are).  Fortunately, they’re not coinciding with a wet storm, so we won’t have any serious coastal flooding:

San Anselmo flood 2005

This week, California will experience the highest tides of the year, peaking on Thursday morning in a condition known as “king tides.” At 9:45 a.m. Wednesday, 10:34 a.m. Thursday and 11:24 a.m. Friday some of the year’s highest tides — 7 feet and above, about a foot higher than normal — will hit Marin’s shorelines.

Water will lap high in Corte Madera, along Richardson Bay and at Gallinas Creek just north of China Camp, among other spots in the county.

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King tides occur several times a year, although this week’s are the biggest of 2012.

Luckily for coastal residents, this week’s tides aren’t expected to cause significant flooding because they are happening during relatively calm weather.

“Flooding would be a concern if we had a storm system coming through,” said Matt Mehle, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

The fact that this is an ordinary event hasn’t stopped the resident Chicken Littles from screaming about the global warming sky falling:

chicken-little

The gravitational tug of the moon and sun, not climate change, is responsible for the extreme tides. But volunteers with cameras across the state are using the event to document what California could look like in the coming decades as the warming Earth continues to raise sea levels.

This overwrought reaction is a reminder that you really can’t change a monomaniac’s mind.  It’s no use telling your average obsessed Climate Changer that, throughout the earth’s lifespan, the water has risen and the water has fallen again.  Glaciers have advanced and retreated. Deserts have become forests and forests have become deserts. The earth is a dynamic system.

Humans can definitely affect their immediate surrounding, whether it’s early man hunting the Mammoth to extinction or modern factories destroying all of the surrounding ecology.  As the Earth’s caretakers, it’s foolish and short-sighted of us willfully to destroy our own environment.  The more responsible we are, the better for us and for our children.

Global water levels, though, are bigger than we are, and they are timeless. Indeed, this seems like a very good moment to bring to your attention an article positing that it was glacial retreat that caused the flood that led Noah to build his Ark:

Noah's Ark

A flood of Biblical proportions just like in the story of Noah’s Ark may have actually happened, according to the oceanographer who found the Titanic.

Acclaimed underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard claims his team of researchers have uncovered evidence that suggests The Great Flood described in the Bible was actually based on real events.

Mr Ballard told how he investigated a controversial theory proposed by two scientists from Columbia University that there was a massive flood in the Black Sea region.

In an interview with ABC News, he said around 12,000 years ago much of the world was covered in ice and the Black Sea had been a freshwater lake surrounded by farmland.

But when the glaciers began to melt during a warming period in the cycle of the Earth’s temperature around 5600BC water rushed toward the world’s oceans, Mr Ballard said.

This, he claimed, caused floods all around the world and water cascaded through Turkey’s Straits of Bosporus towards the Black Sea.

If the seas do continue to rise, it will affect the way we live.  But trying to de-industrialize America will not stop the seas from rising.  These AGW Chicken Littles show megalomaniacal arrogance insofar as they believe that we puny humans can change weather cycles that happened with relentless regularity for billions of years.